Bachelor Cooking: Pork Chops with Mushrooms

It’s easy to presume that, as a bachelor, I would live on a “royal” diet – Burger King, Dairy Queen, ha ha – but recently I picked up a cookbook from the “Pioneer Woman,” Ree Drummond, that offers simple recipes that anybody can enjoy.

Okay, I’ll gamble and try this out.

The first recipe I tried was for a smothered pork chops dinner. But since I didn’t have all the ingredients to make the gravy and sauce and minced vegetable topping … I improvised.

Hey, I’m allowed fo improvise. What’s the worst that could happen? Ree Drummond’s going to get in her pickup truck, drive from wherever in the Midwest she’s located, come up to New York, find where I live and whack me in the head with a cast iron frying pan?

(looking out the window to make sure there’s no pickup trucks with out-of-state license plates nearby).

All right, let’s do this. Here’s what I did, and you can follow along.

Ingredients:

Pork chops, thin cut

Flour

Spices, including black pepper, cayenne powder, chili powder

Olive oil

Salted butter

Diced mushrooms

Kosher salt (every good recipe needs Kosher salt)

In a cast iron frying pan (preferably not the one Ree Drummond will hit you with), pour 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/2 stick of butter into the pan. Heat until melted.

In a paper plate, pour flour and spices. Mix together. Dip the pork chops in the mixture. Coat all sides.

With the pan still hot, lay the pork chops into the melted butter / olive oil. You should be able to get two cutlets in the pan at once. Cook for four minutes on one side, flip, cook for two more. Place onto serving plate.

Now add the sliced mushrooms into the pan. Cook until tender, flipping the mushrooms often.

Slide the mushrooms out of the pan and onto your pork chops.

And you get this.

Doesn’t that look good?

Two pork chop cutlets are good enough for a bachelor, but if you’re hoping for company, make a few extra. You can probably make about six to eight cutlets from the juice in the pan, just fry them up two at a time. And a carton of store-bought mushrooms (or a can or two of canned mushrooms) goes a long, long way.

And how does this meal taste?

Here’s the endorsement.

I had this for dinner yesterday.

I’m still alive today.

There’s your endorsement.

So I’m going to check out this Pioneer Woman cookbook for some other recipes. Heck, maybe there’s something else in here that a Bachelor Man can make. Right?